I am still in shock, and many people are, after the tragic events from Friday. And I hear the usual recriminations from people around me and on TV.
Thing is, you can blame violence in the media (comic books, movies, etc). Sure. You can gripe about parents and upbringing. You could also jaw about how “if someone else in the audience had exercised their right to bear arms” — and in each case above you’d be missing the point, as most folks usually do.
And the point is: some people will be crazy, depressed, or violent. And often all three. We will ALWAYS have these kind of problems, and yet we make it all-too-easy for basket cases to slaughter innocent people on a whim in this country. Bad things always will happen everywhere in the world. What SHOULDN’T always be the case is innocent people dying because some idiot could buy 1,000 rounds of ammo and 100-round clips that can be reloaded in 1.5 seconds and unloaded in less than 60 seconds.
And we will just wait for it to happen again. The debate will cool, and we’ll move on like we did in Killeen, TX in 1991. In Columbine ’99. And on and on, right on up past Arizona 2011 to today. People forget. They won’t remember Aurora in a year or two. I would love to be proven wrong, but as the eventual “The Dark Knight Rises” ticket sales will tell you, with every passing day we forget. It’s a foregone conclusion, our national amnesia, and how little our society wants to have this debate.
I believe in the right to bear arms as defined in our Constitution. I don’t believe in the right to easily obtain the ability to mow crowds down on a mass scale.
For more insightful reading on this than I can give, I recommend Roger Ebert’s take.
Originally published at julianwest.me on July 23, 2012.